Tag: Iowa Writers Library

James Alan McPherson Park

I discovered recently from a news item that a local park (formerly Creekside Park) in Iowa City has been renamed James Alan McPherson Park. I realize it’s incredible, but I didn’t know who he was. How did he escape my notice? We’ve lived in the Iowa City and Coralville area for over 30 years and the African American Pulitzer Prize winning fiction writer and Iowa Writers’ Workshop professor had been here the whole time. McPherson died of pneumonia complications in 2016.

We moved in different circles. My wife, Sena, and I moved to Iowa City in 1988 so that I could attend the new summer enrichment medical school program for minority and disadvantaged students. The program owed its start to a leading African American University of Iowa professor, Philip Hubbard. I graduated in 1992, finished my psychiatry residency in 1996, and spent nearly my entire career working as a psychiatric consultant in the University of Iowa general hospital until my retirement last summer.

In contrast, McPherson spent his whole career as a fiction writer. He earned his Master of Fine Arts at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971. He returned in 1981 to become a faculty member there and lived in Iowa City until his death. He won both the Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. In fact, his fame as a writer was established before he ever got to Iowa. McPherson made a substantial contribution to the workshop’s reputation as one of the top creative writing programs in the world.

Last January when I wrote the post about the Iowa River Landing Sculpture Walk, we visited the Iowa Writers Library at the Coralville Marriott Hotel and Conference Center. I mentioned Margaret Walker, the first African American woman accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I still think the IRL should have a sculpture honoring her.

But I can’t even recall seeing a book by an African American man in the lowa Writers Library. It’s maintained by the Coralville Public Library, whose website lists several of McPherson’s works, including Elbow Room (which won the Pulitzer in 1978), as being shelved there. I remember thinking that the collection was a bit disorganized and that some books seemed to be missing or shelved in the wrong places. But since I wasn’t even aware of McPherson, I can’t say his books weren’t there.

Even though I have a copy of the book Invisible Hawkeyes: African American at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era, edited by Lena M. Hill and Michael D. Hill, I missed any mention of McPherson in the chapter, Obscured Traditions: Blacks at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1940-1965. One reason might be the time frame, which preceded McPherson’s matriculation. However, that’s no excuse because the very last page of the chapter mentions him.

The conclusion chapter of Invisible Hawkeyes (An Indivisible Legacy: Iowa and the Conscience of Democracy by Michael D. Hill in Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era, in Chapter Four: Obscured Traditions: Blacks at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1940-1965, by Michael D. Hill, University of Iowa Press, 2016). does devote a lot of attention to McPherson’s role at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While Hill acknowledges that McPherson described his experience at Iowa as “humanizing,” this was in the context of the struggle against racism endured by most other African American students who preceded him decades before. Interestingly, Hill suggests that it’s ironic for an alumnus of a historically black college or university (HBCU), (which was Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia) to express a fondness for Iowa, a place where racism was keenly felt by his predecessors and which Hill suspects McPherson might not have understood in detail and which he discussed only in the abstract with his mentor, Ralph Ellison (author of Invisible Man).

Well, I’m in way over my head there—and I think it’s better for Michael Hill himself to comment on how irony seemed a part of McPherson. He’s also in the best position to describe McPherson as a person as well as a writer. In the video, Hill’s initial comments are about McPherson’s reaction to being the recipient of the Pulitzer Price for Elbow Room, his book of short stories.

We just ordered a copy of Elbow Room. I read a few of the stories from it on the web. It’s funny how chapters from some books find their way out there, often through university web sites, it seems. He was a genius at storytelling. Just from a psychiatric clinician’s standpoint, “The Story of a Dead Man” is a perfect description of someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder, something a colleague wrote about: Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy) by Donald W. Black, MD, 2013 Oxford University Press. It’s an autographed copy. Incidentally, whenever I google black psychiatrists in Iowa, Dr. Black’s always near the top of the page. His name is Black but black he is not.

Which brings up a sense of humor, something which many people say McPherson had. He used a sense of humor several times during a fascinating 1983 interview with Bob Shacochis for the Iowa Journal of Literary Studies. It seems to me that they got a bit annoyed with each other a few times. One of the more striking comments from McPherson was his quote of an old Negro saying, “You may be my color, but you ain’t my kind.” The context was a question from Shacochis about McPherson’s thoughts about the Third World. I was puzzled by his reply that he thought the Third World was a “fiction.” McPherson said if the Third World has any power, then it might be politically advantageous for African Americans to identify themselves with it. He wasn’t after power, he just wanted to find his kind—and that didn’t have anything to do with color.

McPherson was very evocative in his writing and his speech. That old Negro saying evoked a memory in me of my short time at Huston-Tillotson College (another HBCU, in Austin, Texas) in the mid-1970s. I had grown up in Iowa in what were basically all white schools where I was the only African American kid in the classroom. When I finally went to H-TC, I felt very out of place. Even my Northern accent got me into trouble. One student asked me, “Why do you talk so hard?” There was this one time when I tried to play in a pickup basketball game with a group of other students. I was a very clumsy player. For the briefest of moments while struggling underneath the basket, I got murmurs of encouragement from several of them, even members of the opposite team. I will never forget how good that made me feel, especially when I contrast it with a memory from my hometown when I tried to play with a bunch of white guys. When one of them called out, “Don’t worry about the nigger!” I went and sat down on the bench.

The point is that nobody at H-TC ever said to me “You may be my color, but you ain’t my kind.” I said that to myself. Now, somebody else sent me a similar message to me in Iowa, shortly before I left for H-TC. It was a white woman who thought she meant well; she knew I was going there. She showed me a picture of a young black woman with the clear intention of trying to get me interested in females closer to my own color. The message was more like “You may be in my back yard, but you ain’t my color.”

Speaking of back yards, when I was in elementary school, a couple of white bullies a few grades ahead of me found me at my house and started beating the crap out of me in my own back yard. Somehow, they knew that I wrote little stories and brought them to school to read. I began doing that for my mother at home. I promised them I would put them in my stories if they would quit beating on me. They believed me and stopped. It didn’t occur to me how dumb they were for a long time after.

Those little anecdotes are nothing like the jewels that McPherson fashioned. My stories here are true biography of pain. James Alan McPherson’s stories were true fiction, something magical and evocative enough to foster healing of pain. I hope he found his kind.

James Alan McPherson did more than enough to get his name on a sign and dedication plaque for a small park.

The Iowa River Landing Sculpture Walk

I had so much fun with the giant chicken post on January 25, 2020 that I thought it would be nice to revisit the subject, only this time take a butt-freezing tour of the entire Iowa River Landing (IRL) Sculpture Walk.

We took the walk Tuesday, January 28, 2020. The weather was typical for Iowa in January. The temperature was in the teens and there were brief flurries. My wife, Sena, and I dressed warm and took a meandering journey through the Sculpture Walk, guided by a small map.

It was a little more challenging because snow and ice covered up many of the plaques identifying the works (and parts of the sculptures as well) although this lent even more visual interest to them. They’re three dimensional objects anyway and you really have to walk around them to fully appreciate their complexity. You have to watch out for yellow snow.

What made this adventure even more special was the Iowa Writers’ Library in the lobby of the Coralville Marriott Hotel and Conference Center. It’s maintained by the Coralville Public Library. One of the issues I had was being unfamiliar with the text of the poems and other literary works (all were connected with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) referenced by the artists. The library was cozy, had a fireplace warming the softly lit room lined by bookshelves and a couple of ladders on wheels to help you reach the books higher up.

I have always felt comforted in libraries, ever since I was a little boy. Every day I got the chance, I would walk to my hometown library (which was about a mile trip), browse the stacks for hours, then tote home piles of books in both arms.

The hotel library had most of the books pertinent to the literary references cited by the artists for their sculptures. I even found David B. Axelrod’s book, The Man Who Fell in Love with a Chicken. It turns out that the title of Axelrod’s poem is “The Man Who Fell in Love with His Chicken.” There, I’ve said enough already about that chicken.

Of course, I couldn’t take the time to find and read every book; we would not have had time to freeze our butts off touring the sculptures.

I didn’t wear my heavy winter boots and had to crunch through the crusty snow nearly up to my ankles to reach certain sculptures. Sena was dressed better for the weather but we both slipped around on the ice and I began to think more and more about things like broken hips.

But we soldiered on because it was necessary to walk completely around the Made of Money sculpture by Aaron Wilson in order to see the message printed, “HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?” It’s funny because that’s what I typically ask patients in the general hospital when I sit down on my little camp stool after I introduce myself to them as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist.

The sculpture To Dorothy, by artist James Anthony Bearden, was in a difficult spot and initially we thought we’d have to either rappel down from the roof of the building it was in front of or climb up the big retaining walls to get a good look at it. We found a way out to it and ignored passersby who gawked at us. They needed to admire us for how unique we are (not how eccentric and possibly a danger to ourselves and others), which is what I think Iowa Poet Laureate Marvin Bell was getting at in his poem of the same title as Bearden’s sculpture.

The sculpture, A Thousand Acres, by artist V. Skip Willits was another piece you really have to walk around to fully appreciate, although you generally have to do that with any sculpture. The book of the same title by Jane Smiley is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear—which I have also never read—but which I got an earful about in my undergraduate days from a fellow student who thought he knew everything there was to know about King Lear. He was garrulous in the extreme and bested me in debating class mainly because he never let me open my mouth.

The sculpture by artist Victoria Ann Reed, called Convergence, was very intriguing and looked more like a human figure who had been through a wormhole than a memory.

The Tipping Point, by artist Sarah Deppe, was a convincing image of persons with holes in their heads (several holes in fact). Bureaucrats come to mind.

We nearly dismissed the sculpture called After Trillium by artist Anthony Castronovo as a broken lamppost with dysfunctional solar panels, only partly because snow and ice covered the panel describing it. On the other hand, the top part does resemble a flower called a Trillium, not to be confused with Trillian, a character in the book by Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m glad I could clear that up for you.

The Prairie Breeze Bench by artist Bounnak Thammavong is a sculpture you could actually sit on and watch the Bald Eagles. However, it’s made of steel and the seat was covered by snow. After you wipe away the Bald Eagle droppings, you can read the poem by James Hearst, “Landscape Iowa.” You can also hear it set to music and performed by Scott Cawelti, a former University of Northern Iowa educator who taught film, writing, and literature courses. He also edited The Complete Poetry of James Hearst (University of Iowa Press, 2001).

The Alidade sculpture by Dan Perry was the one Sena and I both really liked. I know Perry says the alidade was used by astronomers but I remember it as being a part of an instrument used by land surveyors, also for measuring distance and angles in topographical surveys. I used to work for consulting engineers as a surveyor’s assistance and draftsman many years ago. Perry links it to the poem entitled “1,2,3” from James Galvin’s book of poems, X: Poems. I confess I don’t see the connection yet. The poem for the most part reminds me of spelunking although Galvin describes a hole that he and a friend rappel into as being a planet. Much of the rest seems to be about something very painful. I’m sorry I can’t do better, but that’s why he’s a poet and I’m not.

Next, we encountered Bounnak Thammavong’s second sculpture, a very recognizable fish, a “lowly river carp,” entitled From the River. It’s linked to the poem “Where Water Comes Together with Other Water” by Raymond Carver. When I was a boy, I used to fish for bullhead in my hometown river. I sometimes caught carp and thought that was the poorer catch. It didn’t matter. I always threw both back into the river. My mom would not clean fish and neither would I.

Finally, by a pretty circuitous route, we saw the last sculpture, Gilead, by artist Kristin Garnant. The snow plow had piled up a lot of snow around it. I probably won’t read Gilead, the epistolary novel by Marilynne Robinson.

In fact, I probably won’t read a lot of the literature connected with the sculptures we saw. I did read Margaret Walker’s poem “For My people.” Sorry, Jubilee is way too much for me. She was the first African-American woman to be accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, of course depending on which story you believe about when the program formally began (Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era, in Chapter Four: Obscured Traditions: Blacks at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1940-1965, by Michael D. Hill, University of Iowa Press, 2016).

In some ways, I identify way with her, one of the reasons being obvious and skin-deep. The other is that she taught school at Jackson State, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi.

I wonder if the IRL Sculpture Walk could include another one for her, just to make it an even dozen?

I spent my Freshman and Sophomore college years at a historically black college. It was then called Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin, Texas. That was back in the mid-1970s. I had grown up in largely white neighborhoods and gone to predominantly white schools prior to going to H-TC. It was a culture shock and that’s probably about all I’ll say about it for now, since this post is way too long.

I can say one other thing about H-TC. I submitted a poem for the college’s annual poetry contest. Winners would have their work published in the school’s small anthology called Habari Gani (Swahili for What’s Going On?). Mine didn’t make it but years later I scoured the web looking for a way to get a copy of Habari Gani, finally succeeding only a few years ago after tracking a copy of the Spring 1975 volume down at the H-TU library. I like the short introductory poem:

“Let your hum be the dream

Of an understanding universe…

Let your hum be a perfect

Utopia of Love”

–Patricia Lloyd